Wednesday, 29 December 2010

Bad characters

Recent pub visits have reacquainted me with two of my bêtes noires of irritating behaviour in pubs. First is the “bar prowler”, a regular who fancies himself as a bit of a character, and who isn’t content just to stand by the bar, but instead walks a regular beat between the counter and some other feature, often the fireplace. Even though probably a sad and lonely individual, he clearly sees himself as the “cock of the walk”. Certainly a cock.

It’s even worse when he starts engaging people in what he no doubt imagines is genial banter. At times, this can verge on the deranged, such as the old boy who told me on walking into a pub that I looked like Elton John. For a second, it seemed amusing, until it clicked that he was actually a total fruitloop. Frankly, customers don’t want these tedious so-called characters prying and disturbing them.

Then there is the “space eater” who sits in the gap between two tables and thus deters anyone from using either of them. Obviously, if the pub is very busy, people will muscle in, but if it’s quietish they’ll tend to sit elsewhere for fear of appearing rude. The best I’ve ever seen was in a Peak District pub where one “character” plonked himself down in the gap on the bar side of a large two-table alcove that could probably have accommodated sixteen people. Sitting at one table but putting your drink on the other is a favourite technique.

“It’s always the same congregation of characters, no matter where you go. A clown, a moron, a megalomaniac, a teacher who wants to be a writer, a lowlife cabbage that wants to be a musician, a sociopath wisecrack, a greasy scumbag with long curly hair trying to chat up each and every woman that passes his arse, a raving alcoholic who claims that his hands were once steady enough to score ten triple twenties without faltering, a religious nutter who, for all his strong beliefs, will not turn your soda into wine, an old bag with hairy legs and fetid teeth who is never going to snap out of her family-bullshit loop, an obnoxious businessman out of place, not to mention two barmen from the shop across the road who either drink themselves out of their misery within thirty seconds or else are forever giving free advice on how to run a pub, disregarding the fact that most of their customers are now getting served by the staff around them, a Bud Spencer look-alike lumberjack who is every girlie’s darling but bent as a two-pound note, a suicidal cigar smoker who might not live to enjoy another drag from his stinking root, a loudmouthed potbellied ruffian studying an atlas on African grass leaves, wearing gaudy socks that say ‘mine is a pint’, the local tart on her wonted seat who knows all of them by size, smell and taste, and the silent observing schoolboy who is desperately trying to render himself interesting by keeping a very low profile, ignored by all the men, scoffed at by all the women, a wry smile on his pimpled face.” From: Live and die the Irish way (eBook short story collection by fellow author Robert Hrdina)

What's happening on Twitter?

Most recent comments

A Martin Scriblerus Blog

Salient quotations

"If I see one more politician who voted for the smoking ban crying crocodile tears about the state of the pub industry, I may throw up." (Chris Snowdon)

"The era of big, bossy, state interference, top-down lever pulling is coming to an end." (David Cameron, 2008)

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." (H. L. Mencken)

"The final nails have now been hammered into the coffin of the freedom to smoke in enclosed public places. This piece of legislation must be one of the most restrictive, spiteful and socially divisive imposed by any British Government. (Lord Stoddart of Swindon)

"Raising taxes on alcohol to prevent problem drinking is akin to raising the price of gasoline to prevent people from speeding." (Edward Peter Stringham)

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." (C. S. Lewis)

"People who deal only in 'craft' beer do not care about some dirty old pub and the dirty old people who are in it and the dirty old community that it holds together." (Boozy Procrastinator)

"There's a saying that, given time, all organisations end up as if they were run by a conspiracy of their foes." (Rhys Jones)

"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming 'Wow! What a Ride!" (Hunter S. Thompson)

"No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home at Weston-super-Mare." (Kingsley Amis)

"When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves,
For you will have lost the last of England." (Hilaire Belloc)